


Something Nice at Home

by violetnyte



Category: Starfighter (Comic)
Genre: Cain is a good boyfriend, Domestic Fluff, M/M, Wobbles and fluff, fic request, kitty!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 09:11:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violetnyte/pseuds/violetnyte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cain arrives home to find something wrong with Abel, and now he's got to fix it. Inspired by tumultuous feels on tumblr and the insistence for something sweet and good, where Cain tries to be nice and actually manages to be nice/do the right thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Nice at Home

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to ASC, Seb, Eli, and everyone else whose hearts I've broken elsewhere.

He should have known something was wrong as soon as he saw the awkward, sideways tilt of Abel’s bike in its parking spot. Put there in a hurry, almost flung aside, but Cain just looked at it with curiosity and then kept right on walking. Got all the way inside the apartment, too, before the sense of something being wrong became overpowering.

All the lights were off despite the late hour, and if it wasn’t for the fact he’d seen the bike out front, Cain might have thought that Abel wasn’t even home. He found the motorcycle keys lying inside the entry, Abel’s shoes scattered through the hallway, and his jacket just outside the closed bedroom door. Abel, the one who fussed at Cain for leaving shit out, who insisted that shoes get set just inside the door, he’d tracked mud all the way through the living room.

Cain wouldn’t have knocked normally, but all that fucking wrongness made him do it. Softly, like maybe he was a bit spooked after all, not sure what he’d find on the other side of a door they always left open because otherwise the damned cat would scratch at it while they were having sex. Better to let the stupid cat sit and watch, the creepy motherfucker, just one more reason Cain considered it to be a demon on four legs, some bewitching thing that Abel loved beyond reason.

No answer, so he knocked again. And then just opened the fucking door, because it was his house, too, not just Abel and the dumb cat. “Hey, princess, you in here?” It came out harsher than he meant, but maybe Abel drove home drunk like a fucking idiot. It would explain all the wrong shit.

An Abel-sized lump on the bed rolled over with lethargic disinterest. Definitely drunk, and Cain felt a bolt of excitement straight into his groin. Abel was always hot and slutty for it when he drank. Until the lump made a wet, sniveling sound, and Cain realized there was nothing hot and slutty about what was happening on their bed.

Abel sat upright, scrubbing at his face like some little kid, and Cain came forward like being pulled along by his heart strings, petrified of finding out the waterworks were for something he did. His mind raced, trying to remember what the fuck he could have done wrong between leaving for work and coming home.

“Hi,” said Abel. Kind of shy, embarrassed to have been caught crying, breath hitching like he wasn’t through sobbing.

“Uh, hi.” Cain stopped beside the bed, hands in his pockets, barefoot in his jeans because Abel fussed about the carpets. Asking if Abel was okay felt like the wrong thing to do, so he said nothing. He sat instead, on the very edge of the bed in case he’d fucked this up somehow and needed to make a quick getaway.

The blond tuffs of Abel’s hair stuck up toward the back, tousled from rolling all over the bed, making him look like some miserable rain-soaked fallen angel. “A-are you hungry?” he asked. He smoothed at his cheeks, whisking away the tears, the gesture little pats like he was trying to slap himself together with it. “I can, um, reheat something.”

“Whatever,” said Cain. “I can cook for myself.” His stomach started turning into slow little knots the longer Abel just sat there not saying what was wrong, what he’d done to fuck things up, or, if it wasn’t his fault for once, who Cain needed to go fuck up to make things better.

Abel broke into a watery smile. “I haven’t replaced the smoke alarm since the last time.”

Because it wouldn’t stop squawking about the pancakes being a little black on one side, and Cain hit it with the dishrag until the damn thing fell off the wall and shattered. Abel probably wasn’t in here sobbing because of his intense love for a smoke alarm, so he wasn’t going to waste anymore time apologizing or feeling bad for it. Abel just laughed it off at the time anyway, told Cain that breakfast in bed wasn’t necessary, but fuck if he was going to listen even if meant cold cereal for Abel as Cain stubbornly ate the burnt pancakes. Their anniversary only happened once a year, dammit.

“Uh,” said Cain. He’d let the silence stretch a bit too long, and now Abel was dabbing at his eyes again, all tore up over something and not saying what. “You, uh. Okay?”

Abel nodded, dropped his eyes into his lap, and scrunched together a sniffling sadness that felt like a fucking Colteron warhead to the face. Cain grit his teeth and said around the clenched row of them, “You mad at me?”

“What? No.” More tears, because if Cain was going to make a mess of things he might as well go big or go home. Abel shucked the back of his hand across his eyes and said, “Koshka—“

Which was all he got out before it turned into blubbering, and of course it had be about the damned cat, because Abel loved that thing more than anyone had the sense to love something that did nothing but eat, piss, and rip holes in Cain’s ankles. “What about Koshka?”

Abel fell into him, fingers clutching and shaking, so that Cain had to put his arms around the smaller man and hold him close. “S-she’s d-dead,” said Abel.

Well, fuck. Cain patted awkward comfort into the tremulous line of Abel’s thin shoulders. “What happened, sweetheart?”

“She got out somehow and – got hit. I saw her in the road coming home. I couldn’t – I just left her there.”

Well, double fuck. Cain changed the rhythm of his hand from patting to stroking, petting at Abel the same way that Abel always petted at the damned cat on the cozy nights they spent together in bed, Abel reading, Cain pretending to watch television but mostly just watching Abel read, the stupid cat purring between them.

“I’ll get her,” Cain said. Surprised himself with it, but as Abel perked up to look at him with some wrenching mix of hopeful and guilty, Cain realized it was the right thing to say for once. “I’ll get her for you. We can, uh.” (What the fuck did you do with a dead cat?) “I’ll get her.”

“Thanks,” said Abel quietly. He looped his arms around Cain and hugged him, chin rested into his shoulder. The decision seemed to calm at him, so that Cain wondered if he wasn’t more upset about being unable to go scrape his poor dead cat off the road than her actual being dead.

But Cain wasn’t stupid enough to say this, he just accepted the embrace and tipped Abel’s lips to his for a kiss that felt wet and tasted like salt. He got up from the bed and turned on the lights through the house as he left. Shoved his feet back into his boots, worked his arms through his jacket, and lit up a cigarette as soon as he stepped outside. Dark clouds all stuck through the night sky and the heavy velvet smell of rain in the air, might as well make this quick before the storm broke. He hadn’t seen anything in the street on his way home, but Abel took a different route on his motorcycle than Cain did walking from the bus stop, so he knew where to start looking.

It didn’t take long. Just up the street, passed the stop sign, a fuzzy black broken thing that was the source of so much misery lying there almost like being asleep. Maybe he’d get Abel another cat. It wasn’t like they’d meant to get the one they had. Abel just showed up with her one day, spinning some story about finding a stray kitten in the warehouse at work, about how no one wanted her. All skin and bones and fur, would rather spit and hiss than let you hold her, and Cain hadn’t meant to name her when he started cussing about it.

Cain stood on the sidewalk, gathering up his courage and finishing his cigarette before going to get Abel’s poor dead cat. She’d been gangly as a kitten, turned into complacent fat fluff after they got her fixed. Abel liked to play with her some evenings, crumpling paper into balls for her to bat around the floor, dangling shoelaces and socks into her face. When Abel went to the colonies for two weeks on business, the damned cat insisted on sleeping on his side of the bed, right on his pillow, so Cain couldn’t sleep alone and always had that stupid cat purring at him. And when Abel came home, Cain went to go pick him up and took the cat along in the car as a surprise.

“Well, fuck,” Cain said aloud. He snubbed out the cigarette, checked for traffic, and stepped out in the street to get Koshka.

He crouched down in front of the body, momentarily squeamish about using his bare hands, and that slight hesitation made him look a bit closer at the russet stains through the black fur. Not blood like he’d originally thought, because there was hardly a mark on her, but just some weird cat pattern.

The damn thing wasn’t even their cat.

Cain jolted to his feet, cursing, and got out of the street before a car could come along and hit him, and Abel would be too traumatized to ever leave the house again. “Koshka, where the fuck are you?” And then again, louder, like some idiot, “Koshka!”

Judging how broken up over it Abel was, Cain could just as easily throw the wrong-cat’s body in a box and pretend like he didn’t know the difference between solid black and motley black. Abel wouldn’t want to look, he was such a priss about shit like that, shockingly unable to handle even slasher flicks and crime dramas, much less a poor dead cat. Cain could drive him out to some stretch of woods, chuck the box in the ground, let Abel cry about it, and then take him home and not mention getting another cat.

“Koshka, goddammit.” Like the cat knew her name, just like how Abel, ignorant of Russian, thought that Cain had named their cat. He started walking and made it all the way down to the corner and halfway to the next before the thunder started. “Koshka! You stupid motherfucker!”

When it started raining, Cain at least felt like he knew where to start looking. Damn cat hated water, just like all cats, and Abel earned red stripes of stupidity for trying to bath the filthy stray kitten he brought home. When Abel was busy scrubbing alcohol-soaked cotton balls over the war wounds, Cain dunked the scrawny thing into the sink and rubbed the Q-tip all through her ears just like Abel kept trying to, cleaning out the mites and junk. Difference was that Cain didn’t give a shit if the cat scratched him, where as Abel kept stopping and fussing rather than get it done all at once.

So Cain checked under newspaper stands and bus stops, beside dumpsters and eaves, walking quicker and quicker because eventually Abel was going to notice it didn’t take this long to scoop road kill off the road. He ended up running, splashing through puddles and getting soaked to the bone, still yelling for Abel’s stupid cat like it’d help.

He nearly missed her. Just a pitiful little meow from some bushes out front of a different apartment building, similar enough to their that Cain wondered if the cat wasn’t less of a dumbass than he thought. It was a pathetic thing that he reached in and pulled out by the scruff of the neck, all skin and bone again with her wet fur plastered to her. Her bottle-green eyes peered at Cain with huge, gleaming intensity, looking like Abel did sometimes after having a bad dream, something leftover from the war that sent him shuddering into Cain’s side late at night. 

Cain swore at her in Russian, and it must have sounded enough like her name, or maybe she recognized the harsh cadence of his voice, because she meowed back so pathetically that Cain set her into his jacket and zipped it up. She settled against his chest, wet but purring and oddly warm, and he kept her there with one arm for the walk back.

Once back at the apartment, Cain kicked off his boots and stood dripping tile over the entryway. Abel came out from the kitchen with a coffee mug clutched his hand, big-eyed with worry. His mouth wavered into a sad frown. “Did you find her?”

Grinning seemed like an inappropriate response, not until Cain got his jacket unzipped. The wet cloth resisted him for a moment, fucking up the surprise, and the cat ruined it further by poking her head up at the sound of Abel’s voice. Her claws dug into Cain’s chest and neck as she tried to crawl free, making him yelp profanity.

Abel dropped his coffee mug right onto the carpet, to fucking hell with shoes being inside from now on, judging by splatter of hot chocolate. “Oh!” He put a both hands over his mouth before rushing forward to pull the cat from him, smearing her wet fur all over his face as he hugged her, making a noise that was somewhere between laughing and crying.

Cain rubbed at where her claws had gotten into him and couldn’t help but grin watching Abel make a damn fool over himself over some stupid cat. She shook free of him, tracking wet and junk into the carpet as she wove around their ankles chirping short, cheerful meows. Cain thought that Abel would just go after her again, fussing over the mess or maybe the cat, but the small blond spun around instead and threw his arms over Cain’s neck. Damn near choked him, but Cain wasn’t about to protest now that Abel was smearing wet all over himself again, only this time from Cain’s wet clothes rather than the cat’s wet fur.

“Thank you,” murmured Abel. “I feel so stupid. I thought it was her, I – I –“

Cain rubbed circles into his back, kissed the mussed up sheen of his pale hair. “Well, she’s fine. Damn cat’s still got at least seven lives left after this.”

Abel hugged him tighter, kissed him soundly, and then finally paid attention to the spilled hot chocolate. As Abel scrubbed uselessly to prevent a stain, the cat groomed herself and Cain went to change out his wet clothes. Abel kept laughing about it, kind of shaky at first, running his hands over the cat until she grew tired of the attention and climbed to the top of the refrigerator to escape. Undeterred, he just ran his hands over Cain instead, until he grew hard at the attention and dragged Abel into the bedroom. The damn cat came in halfway through, sat right on the dresser and tipped her head to the side, ears and tail twitching at the noises.

Later Abel lay in bed reading, Cain pretended to watch television while really just watching Abel read, and the damn cat lay curled between them purring.


End file.
